Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Nov. 8, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:13:15

3490 When Being Good Is Bad - Call In Show - November 4th, 2016

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	Hey, you know what's really cool?
	What's really cool is the degree to which philosophy is exploding across the planet as we speak, like tiny little airstrikes of illumination across the entire world, lighting it up like a reverse fireworks show of human enlightenment.
	It's fantastic.
	Just last night, this is why I'm talking about it today, just last night we blew past Half a million subscribers to this very YouTube channel.
	That is astounding.
	So we're talking, in the last 28 days, we did 5.9 million video views.
	5.9 million video views.
	Podcast downloads, you know, for those of you watching this podcast, There's a whole podcast as well.
	You can get that at fdrpodcasts.com.
	The podcast for 5.7 million downloads.
	Now, combine those together, we're talking 11.6 million views in about a month of philosophy.
	To put that in context, the American Music Awards drew, what was that number?
	Oh yes, 11.6 million viewers.
	So basically we did the same numbers in a month that the American Music Awards did.
	And that is pretty cool.
	The amount of content I'm cranking out is nothing short of Herculean, I dare say.
	Just in October, we did 43 videos and 44 podcasts.
	That's quite a lot.
	And there's some I've done, which I haven't even released, like my almost three-hour introduction to the rise of Nazism, which I think you will love when it comes out.
	Some very, very powerful stuff.
	So basically, this show, Free Domain Radio, has a bigger profile, a bigger audience than many of the mainstream media outlets, at least on the web.
	And we have greater views and credibility, which I consider a significant plus.
	And we also know through the grapevine that some very important people are watching this show and it has changed their minds on some very fundamental issues.
	So it's not just you who's being enlightened and growing strong in reason and evidence, but it is also some of the movers and shakers in the world whose minds are being blown wide open to all the facts that existing culture conspires to keep from them.
	And we're only going to get bigger from here.
	I consider this to be the first step.
	We are just getting started in what we can do to bring the world reason and evidence and kindness and virtue and courage and all of the great things that make civilization strong and sustainable.
	This is where you come in.
	I want to be very clear about this.
	You know, people give to their churches.
	They give to their charities.
	They give to their political candidates.
	You know, lunatics on the left get hundreds of millions of dollars.
	You know, think tanks have their own intellectual pets.
	And I'm not doing any of that.
	I'm not taking...
	Donations from big concentrated interests.
	I'm not taking any donations from think tanks.
	I am free to say what I need to say, what civilization needs to hear.
	I am free to enlighten the world because of you.
	Because of your generosity, your support of the show, and for no other reason.
	You know...
	For years, I have had people say to me, Steph, you think you're a smart entrepreneur.
	You think you know what you're doing.
	You don't know anything.
	Because you should really just be taking ads.
	You should be doing this.
	You should be doing that.
	No.
	Absolutely not.
	And this was a tough decision.
	I gave up a lot of income in refusing ads.
	But as it turns out, in this, as in so many other areas, the enlightened people are correct.
	Because a lot of people decided to go online.
	The route of taking ads and then their controversial videos and I have made a few, their controversial videos get demonetized and their business model completely collapses and they're thrown into a panic and then they have to try and backfill by begging for money when they're running out of income to pay their bills and it's not a pretty picture and other people who are dependent on ads have to be careful about what they think and what they say,
	the titles of their videos, the subjects of their videos because they don't want to trigger The tripwire of demonetization.
	I don't have any of those worries.
	I can say what is important.
	I can back it up with facts.
	I can have on the controversial experts.
	I can do the amazing interviews because you support the show rather than advertisers.
	And it leaves me free.
	It's tough to knock me out because there's no concentrated source of income.
	It's dispersed.
	All the kind of stuff I've talked about is a virtue I'm conforming with.
	Because of your generosity, that is why I'm able to do what I'm doing.
	And I thank you from the very bottom of my heart for that kindness.
	I dare say the families who are more peaceful, the people who are more rational, the relationships that are sustained and improved, the courage that people have found to stand up, To immorality in their own lives.
	All those people thank you as well.
	But we are at stage one.
	I think we're getting close to stage two.
	For that, I need your support to survive in this environment, to do the radical things that I'm doing, to bringing the extraordinary truths that I'm bringing.
	to the world I need your support to survive to flourish because here's what you need to do if you value what I'm doing and we know we want to do the honorable thing in life we want to exchange value for value and I've got decades and decades of experience uh in in thinking in reasoning and researching in communicating to the world in a way that people find enormously valuable and compelling you need to exchange value for value so here's what you need to do To get us to stage two,
	to get us what we're going to do in the future, to get us there, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Please, please, you know you need to do the right thing.
	These videos aren't free.
	My time is not free.
	My expenses are not free.
	The technical equipment is not free.
	The research is not free.
	We need your support.
	I need your support to do the next thing, to get to the next thing, to grow this show, to have even greater Influences on art, on culture, on politics, on thinking, on families, on parents who will not hit their children because of this show and the information that it contains.
	With resources, with enough resources, there's literally nothing I cannot do.
	For us to save the world together, you need to do the right thing.
	Please, please go to freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Sign up for a subscription.
	Give me a one-time thing.
	You don't need a PayPal account.
	You can give a Bitcoin.
	Anything that you can spare, anything that you can provide will enormously empower and illuminate what it is that I'm able to do next.
	Now, if you have donated to the show in the past, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for giving me the resources to call down these lightning strikes of enlightenment, causing the hearts and minds of people across the world to glow with new knowledge and new courage and new resolution to do good in the world.
	I really, really appreciate that more than I can ever, ever express.
	Thank you so much.
	Maybe, just maybe it's time to donate again.
	I leave that to your conscience and your integrity and your honor.
	To decide, if you've not donated to this show before, you know you need to do the right thing.
	freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Give me the resources to do what I need to do, to do what the world needs me to do, to do what the future needs me to do.
	Give me the resources to do it, and you will be absolutely amazed at what comes next.
	I promise you.
	For everyone over the years who has loved the show, who has supported the show, who has invested in this show, who have taken the bullets socially for bringing reason and evidence to those around you, thank you so much.
	I am truly humbled by your kindness, by your courage, by your generosity, and I just want to tell you I love you all so much.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you.
	Let's do what needs to be done, and let's do it now.
	Do you ever get the thought or the worry or the concern, the fear, the terror, that perhaps virtue is a great liability in the world, that being good in your mind and heart is being disadvantaged in society as it stands?
	Well, you're not alone in that.
	This first caller had that very question, and we talked about it in great depth and in great detail.
	I think it'd be very, very helpful.
	The second caller is calling in from the socialist 19th layer of hell known as Venezuela and wanted to send a warning up to those of us in the West about the dangers of socialism and political power and corruption and everywhere that it leads.
	The third caller wanted to know about fractional reserve banking, central banking, and so on, and the pluses and minuses that can occur.
	And I love geeking out on the banking stuff.
	So we had a really, really great conversation about the history of banking and what fractional reserve means and whether it's good or bad.
	And it's really, really important to understand this stuff, both for what's going wrong now and what can go right in the future.
	And the fourth was an ex-Marine who was calling in, concerned that there was a concerted effort to destroy Western civilization, the Western way of life, and Western people.
	And we had, I guess he had some speculation as to who it might be, and my response may surprise you.
	I think it will.
	And the fifth one, you know, now that we're in our mid-3500s for shows, I thought, hey, why not define philosophy, you know?
	Seems a bit like the tail wagging the dog.
	I guess I kind of did it before, but we had a very good discussion about what philosophy is and how it can best be applied.
	Alright, well up first today we have Paul.
	Paul wrote in and said, How does an individual encourage children, or anyone, to lead a virtuous existence when living with virtues is often a very real handicap in our present society?
	I personally see the value of trying to lead such a positive life, but convincing most people of this is extremely difficult.
	Most people seem to only want to live a life of ease and comfort, which society incessantly tells them to have at any cost.
	That's from Paul.
	Hey Paul, how are you doing tonight?
	Oh, great.
	I'm well, thank you.
	And do you have kids?
	I do not.
	I do not.
	I have nieces and nephews.
	Right.
	That's a great line from, what's that old Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock movie, Forces of Nature?
	Do you have any kids?
	No, but I see them all over.
	I don't know why that line is funny, but it is.
	Well, I think that virtue is akin to a knowledge of language.
	And the way that we teach children language is really interesting.
	And I was always curious about this before I became a father.
	I mean, how do we learn and absorb language?
	And the same, really, I think could be said to be true of morality.
	How do we learn and absorb Morality, rules for living, standards of behavior.
	Now, the fascinating thing about parenting is that you really don't teach your children much in the way of language.
	So, when I'm reading to my daughter, every now and then, I'll sort of stop.
	You kind of have to guess what words they don't know.
	Because when I'm reading to her, There'll be some words where I'll sort of stop to explain it, and she's like, Dad, I know what that is.
	And other times, I'll sort of stop and explain.
	She's like, oh, thanks.
	And it's like, well, how am I supposed to know?
	But the interesting thing is that she gets words, I think, like most of us do, through context, through association, through the words, before and afterwards, the intent.
	And it takes a couple of times, but there's this weird osmosis that occurs.
	That you just pick up language by being exposed to it.
	And the way that that works with the primary language, I guess we've all experienced how it works picking up a second language.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I don't know if I just hung around in people who spoke Turkish, if I'd end up speaking Turkish or whatever.
	But when it comes to morals, to virtues, well, you live them.
	You display them, right?
	One of the most important virtues is keeping your commitments.
	With a child, you keep your commitments to the child and learning to apologize.
	My daughter is very assertive around other kids.
	I'm always one for like, oh, you want to come play with us?
	She's like, no, I want to play with us with my dad or whatever.
	Sometimes it's one way, sometimes it's the other, but she's very assertive about it.
	I think that's great.
	It's a very good, I think, because she's reasonable about it and nice about it, but very firm.
	And that's a good habit, and there's things that I can learn from her that way, just as I sort of intend to teach her things.
	So, you know, keep your commitments, keep your promises, be generous, and model the behavior that you want your children to exhibit in how you interact with them.
	And if that If the empiricism of what you say and do is there, then conceptualizing it later is a lot easier.
	Whereas if the empirical examples of your own behavior are not there, then it does you very little good.
	In fact, it will probably do you harm.
	To try and conceptualize it later.
	In other words, if I don't keep my word to my daughter and then I say to her later, well, it's important to keep your word.
	Well, first thing she's going to come back is say, well, you know, let me listen 20 times.
	You didn't keep your word because, you know, kids are vices of aggrieved memory if you do them wrong or are not consistent.
	So you model the behavior and then It's the same.
	How do they learn what a chair is?
	Well, they see a whole bunch of chairs and then they conceptualize it from there.
	And how do they know what truth is?
	Well, they hear a whole bunch of truth, hopefully spoken to them, and then they conceptualize it from there.
	It's the same thing with ethics.
	If they have the empirical example of ethical behavior on the parts of parents towards the children, then they will conceptualize it easily and consistency of behavior won't be a threat to any family structure because it's been modeled before it has been defined.
	And when we think about things that we learn, We always see a bunch of examples and then we conceptualize it from there.
	Concepts are imperfectly derived from instances, as I have said, I think, in my second podcast many years ago, Understanding Concepts.
	I think that's how you inculcate.
	That sounds sinister.
	It sounds like indoctrinate, but it's not.
	It's how you foster moral behavior in children.
	It's easy.
	My daughter is a very good person.
	Obviously, that's partly her and partly me and partly her mom and partly the people she's around.
	Now, as far as why should people be moral, well, that's a trickier question.
	I haven't had to deal with that one yet.
	Like, I haven't had my daughter come up to me and say, Dad, you know, it'd be really great if I... Could be in with the cool kids and do bad things.
	Maybe it'll happen someday.
	Probably, I don't think it will, but maybe it will.
	So, convincing now.
	So that's my sort of suggestion.
	And the virtues, you know, courage and honesty and decency and honor, you know, the things that are useful things to have in life.
	So I don't want to encourage her.
	To live a virtuous life.
	I just want her to live a virtuous life, and I want to have that occur because I model it, and then she will find it even easier to model it for her kids and all that kind of good stuff.
	Does that make sense?
	It does, but then once she has exposure to the wider world, you have a conflict there.
	Well, I don't know that I will.
	And this doesn't mean that no one is ever tempted or anything like that, but I don't know that I will.
	So let's say that we're in a mall and she hears Turkish being spoken.
	Well, she won't really understand the language.
	Maybe one day she'll have a desire to learn it.
	I don't know.
	But it won't be something like, wow, I really, really got to speak in that language no matter what.
	I mean, it just won't be the language that she speaks.
	So when she's around people who are doing bad things or suggesting bad things or whatever, then I don't think she'll be particularly tempted by it.
	And, you know, I've certainly, I've shared, you know, just as I do on this show, some stories of people who I think made bad choices and what happened to them.
	So, I just don't think it's going to be very tempting for her to go that way.
	I thank you for your example of using your daughter.
	But I'm thinking more about, I'm not thinking about anyone in particular.
	Just in terms of when people start socializing more with the wider world of school and they come home with things that you haven't taught them.
	You mean like government schools?
	Or maybe when someone, an adult, is watching the news.
	Seeing a world leader do something that's not good and you say, well, this person did that.
	Or if a young person is at work and they're behaving a certain way and then their older mother or father says, why are you doing that?
	The younger person might say, well, this is what I have to do to get ahead.
	Yeah, but I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I mean, human beings are the greatest environmental toxin in the world.
	I mean, they can be wonderful, but a lot of time, they're just, you know, bipedal bags of douchebaggery.
	So, as a parent, it's your job to make sure that your children are not exposed to any environmental toxins.
	You keep them away from Hillary Clinton campaign commercials.
	Like, all the environmental toxins and human beings...
	Or in some ways the most dangerous environmental toxic.
	You wouldn't give your kid a pile of asbestos to play with and you would not permit your child to be around people who are dysfunctional or broken or damaged or dangerous or abusive or dissociated or messed up in any of the six billion ways it seems that human beings can be messed up.
	So it's your job.
	You put a fence around your yard if there's a road and you put a fence around your social circle to keep out dysfunctional people.
	Yes, I am.
	I agree with what you're saying, but the reality of what I've seen, whether it's through my experience or through other people's experience, the world in general, I don't see that...
	We're not talking about the world in general.
	We're talking about people interested in philosophy.
	I'm sorry to sound impatient, but you're saying this stuff just happens.
	No, it doesn't just happen.
	I mean, you make the choice.
	You make the choice about what sort of People your children are going to be exposed to, right?
	Sure.
	And it's your job.
	No, no, I'm not...
	I guess I'm more...
	I guess I'm extending it, in my mind anyway, towards convincing people in general.
	I don't understand.
	How do you convince people to be good?
	Yes.
	Is that what you mean?
	Yes.
	Well, I mean, and it's a great question and there's two ways in which people generally want to be good.
	We're not talking about people who have an innate drive or desire for consistency or to be good and who will pursue it regardless of positive and negative feedback.
	But there are sort of two ways in which people generally approach the question of virtue.
	Number one is they like to see the example of virtue in their lives.
	So they like to see the example of somebody who's living a good life And doing right and hopefully being happy in the pursuit of all of that stuff.
	And they like to see it.
	And this is, you know, it's marketing 101.
	And that makes it sound cheap, but I don't mean it that way.
	Which is that if you want to sell people a diet, you don't show the picture of the fat guy.
	Or maybe you show the before, but you show the picture of a curvaceous, skinny person.
	Or if you want to, you know, you could be over 40 and have ripped abs.
	You don't want to show Michael Moore.
	His abs seem to have been ripped out of him.
	But you show the guy with the six pack or whatever.
	So, people need to see virtue in action in their lives.
	But of course, the reality is that some people will react positively to virtue, but I think a significant proportion of people will react with hostility to virtue.
	I mean, clearly, right?
	I mean, I remember hanging out with two women.
	When I was younger, I had a month off from working as gold panning and I got a A pass to fly anywhere in Ontario for a month.
	And with a friend, I went on a tour of Montreal, Quebec City.
	I think we even went to Thunder Bay.
	We went to a bunch of different cities and places.
	And it was fun.
	I enjoyed it.
	And when I was in Quebec City, I met a woman.
	And we never really dated, but we were friends and we hung out and all that.
	And I was out with her one night in my early 20s.
	And...
	We were sitting in a cab on our way to a disco, and a woman walked down looking amazing physically, right?
	You know, long, tall, lean, dressed to the nines and so on, made up perfectly.
	And the women I was with were certainly very attractive, but not quite that.
	And these two women looked at each other immediately and said, Bitch!
	Because I guess they had assessed her attractiveness relative to their attractiveness.
	She'd come out ahead and they were reacting with some negativity, let's say.
	And it was not a joke.
	Joke was kind of serious.
	And so when people are around people who are better than them, some people take it as an inspiration and some people take it resentfully, right?
	So if a fat guy is around a guy who's lean, he may view that as an inspiration and ask him for advice or he may just Get resentful and hostile and all this kind of stuff.
	So when you let the full flag of your virtue flow, you know, some people will salute and some people will try and tear it down and drive a pickup over it.
	That's just the way it goes.
	But you can, of course, choose the people who salute in your personal life.
	So you can inspire them that way.
	They see you being happy and being good and they want to be happy and If good's how you have to do it, I guess they maybe regretfully say that they'll do it.
	But the other way that people are good is because they want a particular benefit out of it.
	Do we pursue virtue for the thing in itself or do we pursue virtue for some positive benefit we're going to get out of it?
	Immanuel Kant and other people would say, well, no, you can't have any selfish pleasure in virtue.
	The moment you take pleasure in virtue, it's no longer virtuous.
	The moment you give someone $10 because you want to feel good about giving them $10, then it's no longer a generous action.
	You're just using that person to feel good about yourself.
	It's a crappy argument, which is not an argument, I know.
	Crappy is not an argument.
	For good, right?
	Why do guys want six-packs?
	Well, they want to take off their shirt and have women ooh and have men go aww, right?
	Or whatever, right?
	And why do men want money so they can buy things to impress other people?
	And, you know, why do women want to look good so that guys will buy them drinks and make them feel special?
	I mean, people are in pursuit of a positive.
	And so, if reason equals virtue equals happiness, as the old domino The theory goes, then we are good so that we can be happy.
	But like dieting, like exercise, it doesn't always feel good, but it generally has a good end as a whole.
	It's not really an end, but it's a process that leads to good things.
	You know, exercise and all that.
	You often don't enjoy it in the moment, but it leads to general good health and all that.
	So, we have the example which is inspiring.
	We have the positive results.
	And so far, nobody usually has a big problem.
	The big problem comes when I talk about the next part.
	Right?
	Human beings are motivated by carrots and by sticks.
	Like all animals, right?
	Right.
	If your dog does what you want, give him a treat.
	If the puppy pees on the carpet, you might swat its butt with a newspaper.
	I'm not saying you should, shouldn't, I don't have to train a dog, but the carrot and the stick.
	And Bad people, the moment you start talking about a stick, they get very angry, they get very upset, they get very hostile, because they don't want to have any negative consequences for being bad.
	And they don't want to be rejected by good people, because that makes them feel bad about themselves and brings up the inchoate rage of people who are lying to themselves for a living.
	And so the last one is, be good or be gone.
	It's as simple as that.
	Be good or be gone.
	Which brings us back to the first point, which is the environment that you allow your children to be exposed to.
	Mine, five-word mantra, be good or be gone.
	I'm willing to help if you want to be good, but you still got to be good or be gone.
	And that is That is the stick.
	The carrot is, you'll be happy and you'll have my approval and it's a good thing.
	People can be motivated by that if reason isn't enough.
	But the stick is, be good or be gone.
	And if people enjoy my company or enjoy my presence and so on, appreciate my approval, as I appreciate the approval of other people in my life and enjoy their presence, then yeah, be good or be gone.
	And this is the part where people kind of freak out.
	Because beforehand it's all like, oh, it's inspiring and it's positive and you'll be happy, right?
	Everybody's fine until the stick comes out.
	Be good or be gone.
	And if more people did that, then virtue would be a more positive thing to achieve because you wouldn't be ostracized by good people.
	But good people are afraid of ostracizing others because...
	It's considered to be a negative.
	People get angry.
	They get upset.
	And they start using all of these moral words.
	And it's so funny, you know, when immoral people use moral words against good people.
	I mean, it's so pathetic.
	It's so obvious once you see it.
	You're dogmatic.
	You're rigid.
	You're inflexible.
	I'm sorry if I have a spine, you jellyfish souls.
	Anyway, so that's my sort of Thought about it.
	I mean, people should want to be good because it makes them feel good and it's a good thing to do and it makes them happy and feel loved.
	But, you know, sometimes we all need a little, you know, like, I don't know, was it six years or seven years ago?
	I went to the doctor.
	The doctor said, hey, you're kind of overweight.
	Did I like it?
	No.
	Was he right?
	Sure was.
	Dropped 30 pounds, 35 pounds, I think, and kept them off for now six or seven years.
	Because, you know, you just change everything you do in your life and you never go back.
	And that's unusual.
	That's unusual.
	Like only 2% of people lose weight and keep it off.
	And it's rarer still if you're in your...
	I guess I'm 50 now.
	It's in your 40s.
	So your metabolism slowed down and all that.
	So, yeah.
	If you want to be my friend, you have to be good or you have to be gone.
	Sure.
	Honestly, I see a difference between...
	Between what you're saying in your personal life but also as opposed to what happens in, say, your work life where, let's say, if money is the goal and perhaps not being so honest or not being so ethical gets more money,
	that's certainly A way to motivate yourself.
	The opposite is true.
	If you're not perhaps looking the other way or you're cutting corners that might not be so ethical, you're making money.
	Yeah, no, I get it.
	I mean, it's the old offer of the devil, right?
	I mean, I'll give you stuff for your soul.
	I get that.
	I mean, I understand that.
	The answer is older than me, right?
	The answer is way older than me, which is don't do it.
	But that's related to your person's everyday existence, being one in society, being considered a successful person, whatever success means in society.
	So there's a strong...
	Sure.
	And if you're going to define success by making money, then you can go and make money and not be a good person.
	I mean, you can make money and be a good person, too.
	But, no, if all you want the money, it's a great Annie Lennox song.
	I won't sing it, but it goes something like, all the money in the world won't buy you peace of mind.
	You can have it all, but you won't be satisfied.
	And it's true.
	It's true.
	I mentioned this before, but after a breakup of a long relationship in my 20s, I went to live as someone's roommate in a Condo downtown.
	It had a squash court and a jam and it was a nice swimming pool and all that.
	And I was down there in the pool one night alone and I was doing well in the business world and all that.
	But I thought, what if I was rich enough to just have this pool in my house, like an indoor pool in my house?
	And I was alone in the indoor pool in my house.
	How sad would that be?
	How sad?
	There's a desperation.
	Everybody knows.
	Everybody knows money doesn't buy you happiness.
	And that's funny because when you're poor, you think it will.
	Right?
	Old Beatles song.
	Buy you a diamond ring, my friend, if it'll make you feel alright.
	I don't care too much for money.
	Money can't buy me love.
	And I was like, oh, but Wouldn't it?
	Don't give away that diamond ring.
	You can buy something useful with it.
	Candy.
	I agree with you completely.
	Before I moved to Asia, I was in social services, and I thought, this is a great place for me.
	I can help people, and perhaps the good qualities that I have, I can really put forth.
	Put it towards my work and I'll move up.
	But I didn't see that.
	I saw money, the profit of billing, the patients that I was working with and the way they set up the billing.
	The original goal is to make patients, these very severely mentally ill people, the goal was to make them as independent as possible But the way the billing was set up was you had to see them even though you didn't need to see them.
	You needed to see them less so that they eventually become more independent.
	But because the billing was set up where you have to bill to make more money, people who would lie and say that they were with someone, they would be the successful people.
	So the main goal was not being met.
	The main goal being The greater independence of the person.
	So I thought it was very unethical, the encouragement that I was being kind of forced to do.
	So I said, you know, this is not right.
	So I moved to Thailand with my lovely wife and we're living a very honest, simple life.
	Well, I'll tell you.
	I mean, this is the last point that I want to make because I've been around some rich people.
	Some really, really rich people.
	And honestly, I have not noticed them to be happier at all.
	It's very frustrating.
	When you're poor, you're Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?
	When you're poor, you're hungry.
	I was hungry as a kid.
	And I knew rich people.
	I went to go visit my father in Africa and we went over to some guy's house.
	It went on forever.
	I don't know, like 10 bedrooms?
	A sprawling mansion went on forever.
	I had a friend, I was just saying this to my daughter the other day, I have a friend who had a, his family moved into a big, rickety old, cool house right downtown Toronto.
	I can't even imagine how much it would cost.
	And he had one of those, I love these rooms.
	They're underneath the roof, the sloping roofs, and they've got that little window jutting out.
	And it was so cozy in there.
	And he had a futon on the floor, great stereo.
	I was like, ah, man, that'd be the best.
	He had a pretty miserable life of it overall, though.
	And the last thing I mentioned is I was once in a business meeting.
	And this is one of these moments where I was like, the world is not what I thought.
	Where am I? What the hell is going on?
	Where have I ended up?
	I was in a business meeting.
	And one of the people around the boardroom table, a man, was mocking another man.
	And he was mocking that the other man was so lonely that he had to buy a bride from Russia or somewhere.
	I can't remember where it was.
	And the other man got really offended and upset.
	And I was like, where am I? Who the hell am I with?
	What am I doing here with these people?
	I guess if you go to spirit cooking dinners, you may have the same feeling.
	At least I hope you do.
	Right.
	And he was a wealthy guy.
	A wealthy guy.
	So lonely.
	Had to buy a bride from overseas.
	And was tortured by it.
	Tortured by it.
	So, I mean, money...
	It's not like more money, more problems.
	And it's not like money is bad.
	People can accumulate everything they want.
	It's not like all the poor people are good and all the rich people are bad.
	It's not.
	And the studies show this pretty clearly that it doesn't make you happier.
	Therapy makes you happier than a race.
	And as long as you've got your basic needs met, more money isn't going to do you.
	A whole lot of good.
	So you have to be careful not to equate.
	Because when people say more money and it's driven by something other than need, what they're talking about is status.
	That they want to look like a big swinging dick to other people they want to show off and all that.
	And that obviously is pretty empty and doesn't work out for very long.
	And it's actually kind of a humiliating position.
	If you go to work to impress others, well, you're the one at work late, not them.
	They're free.
	They're off there playing baseball with their kids and you're slaving away over a A squinty-eyed, irradiating computer, and you think you're winning relative to them?
	You think you have high status relative to them?
	Good lord.
	Some got to get up at four o'clock in the morning to take a flight to Singapore, and meanwhile they're sleeping in, and their kids jumping in their beds in the morning, but it's okay, because your house is twice as big as theirs, so...
	You're a better person.
	Anyway, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I appreciate the question.
	These are big, big important questions, and I hope that people find value in our conversation about it.
	So thanks a lot.
	And who's next?
	Alright, well up next we have Lewis.
	Lewis wrote in and said, Big government politicians always find common ground here, and people keep falling into a never-ending cycle of disappointment, but keep doing everything as before guaranteeing that nothing changes.
	How would you fight with reason and evidence from the inside of a failed country in which not even alternative media have made people open their eyes to the reality that big government policies always end in corruption and failure?
	That's from Lewis.
	Hi Luis, how are you doing?
	How is life in Venezuela these days?
	Are you safe?
	Are you relatively secure?
	Well, that's, I think, the worst point because the murder rates and the failure of security agencies to protect us is It's terrible.
	I see among my friends, I see around two people who, per week, told their friends in Facebook or in their social accounts how they were robbed, their cell phone, around Twice around, twice per week.
	I read some story around that and I recently lost a close friend.
	He was murdered by someone who was trying to to kidnap him.
	And he's a wrong old man.
	He's 40 years old and completely out of any kind of activity in the In the war law of delinquency.
	So it's someone that you would never expect to lose, I believe, in almost any country.
	And here, it's always a story that's surrounding us.
	Someone who lost A loved friend, a loved family member, or a friend.
	That's the worst, I think, of all the topics, is how the murder rate per 100,000 people is around the roof.
	But that's not the only one.
	That's the one that I'm most sensible to.
	Are you hearing me?
	Yes, I'm fine.
	I thought you were still in the middle of your thought.
	Have you finished your thought?
	Yeah, I think...
	Well, I... I don't know how else I can express that point.
	It's really not safe.
	And every week or every day there is a story how someone, some tourist, was murdered or someone that That was close to leaving the country.
	Many people around here in Venezuela have the role of living or migrating to another country.
	And there is always a story about a tourist or someone was another victim of the The failure of
	any kind of security from the government agency, from the police, that they are mostly fear because it's like common knowledge that Among the police agencies,
	they are also some of the people who commit crimes.
	That's really one of the worst topics.
	But that's not the only one.
	Okay, well I'm going to have to break in and I'll just give you some thoughts about why I think people are unable to see it.
	And, you know, I'm sure you've noticed that these changes can happen very quickly in a country.
	I mean, when it runs out of money, when it runs out of resources, these changes can happen very quickly.
	And it's terrifying.
	And a lot of people, of course, are not prepared for it because they've been lied to for so long by everyone.
	And...
	I think fundamentally, there used to be an aristocracy of intelligence in the world.
	And one of the problems with democracy is that politicians have a tough time telling voters how unbelievably stupid they are, how unbelievably short-sighted they are, how unbelievably greedy they are, how unbelievably irresponsible they They are.
	And this doesn't mean in their personal life.
	They might be okay in their personal life.
	They might be responsible in their personal life.
	But we all know when it comes to the public purse, everybody's a piranha, when in fact everyone's the cow.
	But it used to be that human pride was a sin.
	Now, I think sometimes religion has gone too far in beating back the concept of pride.
	But pride and vanity were sins, as they should be.
	Like genuine earned pride in your achievements is not a sin, obviously, but I'm talking about pride in things you haven't earned.
	Pride of your country, your culture, right?
	They earned these things.
	But vanity in particular.
	A vanity, of course, is little more than imagining you know things that you don't know.
	And vanity, an overestimation of one's own Knowledge and wisdom prevents the actual accumulation of knowledge and wisdom.
	If you think you've achieved your ideal weight, you stop dieting.
	If you want to drive home, by the time you get home, you get out of your car and you stop driving.
	If you think you've arrived, you stop moving.
	And there used to be the relationship between smart people and the masses, between smart people and the mob, has always been Uneasy.
	Because the mob is dumb and vain.
	And this is a very bad combination.
	They're dumb and they're vain.
	And so they have bad answers to problems.
	Unprincipled answers in particular.
	Emotional answers.
	They have bad answers to problems.
	Because they're dumb.
	But they think they're very smart and very wise.
	And that's a dangerous combination because their ego, their sense of self-worth, of self-value, is founded upon a delusion.
	A delusion of intelligence.
	A delusion of competence.
	A delusion of wisdom.
	A delusion of practicality.
	They think they're all these things.
	And reminding them that they're not smart.
	That they have bad ideas, bad solutions, they don't know what they're talking about.
	Reminding them of that can be very volatile, as Socrates found out 2,500 years ago when he was given an espresso shot of hemlock to the hereafter.
	Reminding people that they're dumb and have bad answers is a perilous business.
	Now, just in case you, hang on, just in case you misunderstand me, I'm dumb too.
	In the vast majority of things in life.
	The vast majority of things in life.
	I don't know how to fix my car.
	I changed a tire once.
	I hope to never do it again.
	Right?
	I don't always know what the best thing is for me to eat.
	Sometimes I feel like if I'm in a rush and hurry and working hard and I eat like a goat.
	Whatever I can scoop up from the carpet.
	Take a day.
	There's so many things that I don't know.
	And I'm dumb about them.
	I don't know.
	How things should be fixed.
	I mean, in so many areas.
	I'm just dumb, ignorant, uninformed.
	But I'm smart enough, and I'm good enough.
	Because I'm good at some things, I know what I'm not good at.
	Because there's a contrast.
	But if you're not really good at anything, then you get this, what's called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
	Where you think you're good at something, and you're not.
	And deep down, you kind of know that you're not good at it.
	But you don't want to be exposed because it's humiliating.
	And people who build their personality structures on vanity are exquisitely sensitive to and often enraged by the humiliation of meeting someone who has genuine knowledge as opposed to their pretend knowledge, their, dare I say it, their word salad.
	Or salads.
	Or salad bar, it may be.
	Now, the aristocracy of intelligence used to be Very harsh, very sharp, in that if you were an idiot and you were talking out of turn, they'd say, shut up, idiot.
	You don't know what you're talking about.
	Now, I grew up in that aristocracy of intelligence.
	This was true in boarding school.
	This was true.
	It's true in England.
	If you're putting on airs, if you're pretending to be something you're not, pretending to know something you don't, people are merciless.
	Merciless.
	The pretense of knowledge is a very dangerous thing and needs to be punished socially and all that.
	And what has changed is, well, you know, government schools, teachers who can't be fired, teachers who are terrible, and social promotion.
	One of the ways that you used to know you weren't smart is you would not be promoted to the next grade.
	You'd fail.
	And now, at least in many schools, systems in the West, there's no such thing as failure.
	There's no such thing as failure.
	Everybody gets a grade.
	Everybody gets to move forward.
	You don't have to be particularly good.
	And so everyone just kind of bumps along like leaves on a stream, going down towards wherever.
	And there's no feedback which says to people, you're dumb.
	Now, some of this comes out of political correctness and a desire to avoid racial IQ disparities and all that kind of stuff.
	But basically...
	Having standards that are applicable to everyone, well, you'd end up with, I guess, Asians doing better and you'd end up with blacks doing worse and all that kind of stuff.
	And so people don't want that, so they lowered all the standards and so everybody passes and nobody fails.
	And so people genuinely grow to adulthood thinking that, I graduated high school.
	Really?
	Would you like to go back, say, 30 years and try and graduate that high school?
	Go look up some of the 19th century tests that were given out in America.
	In grade schools, and see how well you do.
	There has been a catastrophic decline in standards in education, and what that means is people think they're smart when they are just ridiculously dumb.
	And, I mean, there may be things that they're great at.
	You know, the guy who fixes my car is really great at fixing cars, and I respect his knowledge.
	That's why I give him money to fix my car.
	But I'm not good at fixing my car, and he's really bad at politics.
	He's really bad at economics.
	He's really bad at philosophy.
	He's terrible at these things, which is fine.
	We all have to specialize.
	And knowledge of what is good for society, knowledge of philosophy, of political science, of economics, and so on, well, that is rare.
	It's very rare.
	You just go around to the average person on the street and ask them what fiat currency is.
	Let's say, I don't know, what you buy a European car with?
	I mean, they won't know.
	Maybe one person in 10,000 would know.
	But everybody wants to vote about how social resources should be allocated or divvied up or taxed or redistributed, but they don't know.
	They have no clue.
	They don't know a goddamn thing about anything.
	And I would never think of grabbing a bunch of random people and all going over to my mechanic's garage and we all vote on how the car gets fixed.
	It would be ridiculous.
	Any more than I would go down with a bunch of friends to the doctor and we all get to vote on what needs to be done to fix whatever ails me.
	We defer to experts.
	But in democracy, the teachers lie to the students to pretend that they're learning something, and the politicians lie to the population and pretend that the population knows something.
	You know, as I pointed out in a recent video, women are idiots when it comes to politics in general.
	And for those of you who are offended, just go to the comments underneath that and count the number of women who say, oh my god, Steph, you're right.
	I tried to talk to my female friends about politics and they just, they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
	And why hasn't that changed?
	Why hasn't that changed?
	Why is it getting worse as women get more secure and economies advance more and women gain more equality?
	They end up knowing less about politics.
	Like Denmark has...
	A greater gap in male-female knowledge about politics than Colombia.
	And why?
	Because nobody's saying to women, sorry, you're stupid about this stuff.
	You don't know what you're talking about.
	You don't have a clue.
	In general.
	And, you know, maybe men aren't that much better, but they're significantly better than women.
	I mean, men aren't good, relative to what I'd like to see, with better education, but they're better than women.
	And so, who is saying, who would say?
	Sorry, ladies.
	You're dumb about this stuff.
	And you need to get better because you've got votes.
	That's the deal.
	You get the vote, start reading yourself some politics.
	And I'm not talking the Huffington Post, like real politics.
	Read some John Locke.
	Read some Rousseau.
	I don't care.
	Anyone who's going to get your thought processes going.
	Pick up some Spencer.
	Pick up some Hume.
	Anybody.
	Can't.
	I don't care.
	Get the thought juices going.
	Recognize you don't know stuff and learn stuff that you need to know because you have a vote.
	But nobody says that.
	The teachers don't say it because they're all women.
	You have female in group preference.
	And the politicians don't say it because they don't want to offend the ladies.
	If you tell us the truth, we won't vote for you.
	Oh yeah, that's going to go great when it comes to democratic futures.
	So people just aren't told that they're stupid at stuff.
	They're not told that they suck at stuff.
	And so you get this puffed up vanity, this hypersensitivity to being corrected, this fear of exposure, and the death of freedom.
	That's sort of my two cents, if that makes any sense.
	And now feel free to chime in with your thoughts.
	Yes, Stefan.
	I wanted to point out that, in fact, that change in which people can fail in the school was one of the first changes that the chavismo made in Venezuela.
	I remember I was around 13 years old.
	That must be then 2003.
	I remember how my teachers in high school were already getting mad at how the new education laws prevented them from failing students.
	They needed to make around four Five extra curricula tests in order for the student to pass at least one of them.
	So the teacher completely loses the motivation to make the fifth of the test.
	That is, repeatedly given the student after he or she failed the previous one, of the same difficulty.
	It's never ending.
	And the laws that were passed very early in this regime made it possible to make teachers responsible for the failing of students.
	And also, another thing that you mentioned that made me remember How people in Venezuela make something that you told, taking pride in things that they didn't earn.
	People in Venezuela are convinced this is a great country, just because it has a bunch of Venezuelans, In the Miss Universe, we're in the Miss Universe,
	just because this is a country with beautiful beaches and the Andalusians are some of the most beautiful,
	or because we have the Salto Angel, A great falling, one of the greatest cataratas.
	And it must be related that they are taking pride in things that they didn't earn because Well, Venezuela sucks.
	As a whole.
	I mean, you've got an average IQ of 84.
	Last time it was measured, it's probably lower now.
	And your corruption index, with 100 being good and zero being bad, Venezuela's 17.
	It's a terrible, terrible place.
	And so people can say, well, we have pretty women in the contest.
	Not that you'll ever meet them.
	We have nice beaches, even if they're covered with drug corpses.
	But the country sucks, and people should panic.
	People should freak out.
	People should recognize that they're living in a post-socialist moral sewer.
	A Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome nightmare of disappearing resources.
	But idiots take pride in things they didn't earn.
	We won a sports team!
	Great!
	I'm hungry!
	Yeah, that's exactly my thought.
	I'm not proud of any of those things.
	No, of course, you didn't earn those.
	I did the elephant in the room.
	Things are terrible here.
	Yeah, but it's a lot cheaper for politicians to deliver false pride than real goods and services.
	It's a lot easier for politicians to deliver empty-headed nationalism than it is for politicians to actually make intelligent decisions about how society should be run.
	And so, you know, I don't know.
	Until either dumb people start listening about what they're dumb about, or until there's a collapse and dumb people are going to tragically get wiped out, You know, the best thing we can do is just keep appealing to people's intelligence and reminding everyone on the planet that they're really bad at most things.
	I am.
	You are.
	We're just really, really bad at most things.
	So, thanks for the call.
	I hope you stay safe.
	I appreciate the topic.
	And let's move on to the next call.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you.
	Alright, up next we have Graham.
	Graham wrote in and said, We live in a world where money and therefore our economy is controlled by the banks and not the people.
	Are you aware of the debate, money creation?
	And some members of parliament call the fractional reserve system fraud on the people.
	And apparently the rest are just ignorant.
	What are your views on this money creation system?
	That's from Graham.
	Well, hey, Graham, do you want to break out the system for some of our new listeners who haven't been around for some of my rants about central banking?
	Yeah.
	Hi, Stefan.
	And by the way, you've just used some great analogies there.
	That was making me laugh, some of them.
	Well, first of all, people have got to understand that there is a difference between currency and money.
	And that's a very simple analogy.
	But money has got an intrinsic value and currency that we currently use in the world, because I don't believe there's a single currency that's backed by gold anymore.
	It's basically what they call the fiat system.
	In other words, it has no value.
	It is just created.
	And to give you an example of a fractional reserve system, If you take, for example, £100 and you put it in the bank, they can loan that out 10 or 20, 30 times.
	There is no limit to what they can loan it out to.
	So in effect, they invent money.
	They magic this money up and they only have to keep a fraction of that money in reserve.
	The rest of it is conjured up by them, in a nutshell.
	Right.
	Now, I have no problem with fractional reserve banking as long as it's in a free market.
	I mean, if you want a place to store your gold-backed currency, then they're going to charge you, right?
	They're going to charge you a safety deposit box fee or whatever it is.
	So it's going to cost you a little bit of money.
	Now, if you say, well, you can take 20% of my gold and you can lend it out and I hope you do a good job and you'll give me the profits, then...
	You might actually make a little bit of scratch.
	You might make a little bit of money.
	A little bit of boxes you might be able to make by letting the bank lend out.
	And the more you let the bank lend out, maybe you can lend out 50% of my money.
	Maybe you can lend out 100% of my money.
	Well, the more likely you are to have both a reward or a loss.
	So if you say to the bank, I'm going to pay you 100 bucks a year to keep my gold, In a vault.
	Okay.
	Well, every year you get an order to go and make sure your gold is still there, unlike the Federal Reserve.
	And you pay your $100 a year and your gold is safe, right?
	But if you don't want to pay $100 a year, then you can say to the bank, okay, lend it out, make some money and use the money that you make from lending it out to pay my safety deposit box or whatever.
	And that's fine.
	I don't care what people do.
	Everyone has different levels of risk and reward, different comfort levels.
	They are in different situations in life.
	And, um, so if people, like, so fractional reserve banking, where your money is lent out at whatever multiple, hell, lend it out at 30 times multiple if you want.
	It's just that, you know, if the stock market changes 3%, you're going to be wiped out.
	Whereas if it goes up, you'll make a lot.
	So how much people want to risk of their money to gain a financial reward?
	It's entirely up to them.
	I don't care.
	I mean, I care generally in a vague sense, you know, but It's not something I'm going to...
	I mean, I've got my own money to manage, my own risks to tolerate and all that.
	So, fractional reserve banking, not the issue.
	Now, generally, of course, what happens is people who gamble and lose want other people to make up their losses.
	Of course they do, right?
	I had a guy on the show a year or two ago who was the head of a bank, and there's a great story in one of his books.
	Where the guys had borrowed a lot of money to buy a $2 million house and his house value in the housing crash had dropped down to a million dollars.
	And he was calling up the bank and he says, oh man, you've got to negotiate.
	You've got to lower my mortgage.
	My house is only worth a million dollars.
	It was worth $2 million.
	Now I'm paying a $2 million mortgage for a house that's only worth a million dollars.
	You've got to help me out.
	Bank owner was walking past and said, give me that phone.
	He picked up the phone.
	He said to the man, all right, let me ask you a question.
	If your house had gone from $2 million to $4 million in value and you'd sold it, would you share any of those profits with the bank?
	Of course, that was a long pause and everyone knows.
	He would say, no, the gains I would keep for myself and wouldn't share them with the bank.
	And he said, well, then why would the bank share your losses if you wouldn't share your gains?
	It's a very sensible question.
	I think that was the end of that negotiation.
	People who get greedy, and you only find out if you're greedy if you lose your money.
	If you don't lose your money, if you gain your money, if it's double or nothing and you get double, then you're prudent, wise, great investor.
	If you get nothing, you're greedy and made a mistake.
	Of course, everybody wants to socialize their losses.
	It's natural.
	You just can't allow it to happen.
	That's all.
	The moral hazard of you could lose your money is really, really important.
	You know, the corporate structures that exist, which are all statist inventions, and I had a conversation with Steph Kinsella years ago about this, which people can check out, K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A. Check out on this channel.
	And so I don't mind fractional reserve banking.
	I don't even care that much about corporate structures, although it would be very different in a free market.
	The problem is, as you point out, it's the government monopoly where you have to use legal tender, You have to use legal tender to pay your taxes.
	You have to use legal tender to pay most bills.
	And you're not allowed to create a competing currency.
	You know, there are some rumors.
	I haven't checked them down.
	I haven't tracked them down and checked them out, but there are rumors that one of the reasons why there's a bayonet in the ass graveyard where Muammar Gaddafi used to be in Libya is that he, perhaps even like Saddam Hussein, was looking to introduce a gold-backed currency.
	You start introducing a gold-backed currency in a world of central banks, yeah.
	You might have a pretty unhealthy day because everybody would flee to that as they are slowly beginning to move into Bitcoin.
	So, yeah, I think the system is wretched.
	I think the system is horrible.
	I just finished a presentation on the rise of Nazism.
	Ooh, you like your three-hour history shows?
	Have I got one for you coming up?
	It's a great, great show.
	And I talk quite a bit about the role of the Rice Bank in the First World War and central banks in the First World War, allowing for the extension of Of the pan-European murderfest, which would have ended in six months if they'd all had to rely on their gold reserves, but because they could print money, they could drag on this goddamn thing for four years and kill 30 million people, all told.
	So, yeah, it is a murderous, horrifying, destructive, vicious, child-enslaving, future-enslaving, debt-enslaving totalitarian system.
	It is the complete socialization of money.
	And this is why when people say, oh, there's a free market, it's like, nope.
	If there's no free market in money...
	There's no free market at all.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, it does.
	There's a couple of things I'd like to say on that, if you don't mind.
	Yeah, please.
	First of all, I am 100% a capitalist.
	I believe that society should be built on value.
	And when I say value, I don't mean monetary value.
	I mean, the people, I know this sounds strange, but there is value in being a nice society, a good society, where everybody lives together and no one really struggles.
	And if people under a capitalist society earn enough money, for example, there's a guy, I don't know if you've heard of the website, billionsinchange.com, where he was a bullish monk.
	And one of the earlier conversations you had, this guy was a Buddhist monk and he made $4 billion.
	And the only reason he wanted to make the $4 billion was so he could put it into engineering and solve problems for the world.
	And he's done that.
	And yet he's had to move from America because they want to shut him down to Singapore.
	For the simple reason that he has created green energy via something called graphene.
	He has created a water system, a fresh water system that can give everywhere that needs water on the planet fresh water.
	And I'm not talking about...
	I'm talking about people who can grow food with this water that he can supply.
	There's a number of things that he's created.
	Sorry, Graham, to interrupt.
	I mean, I've got to tell you, I'm sure you are honest in what you're saying, but the monk worth $4 billion who's developed a system to supply fresh water to everyone on Earth, It sounds like a bit of a character out of a comic book.
	You know what I mean?
	What's the name of this dude?
	What's the story?
	Honestly, you can look at his...
	No, he's not saying that.
	What he's saying is there are parts of this planet that are struggling with fresh water, and yet there's seawars.
	So he's devised a concept, and they've actually used it.
	They're showing it.
	If you watch the film, you can see it.
	It's called Billions in Change.
	But my point is...
	He took his money and said, I want to engineer.
	I want to create things for people.
	And in the past, it has only been capitalism that has created that.
	It is capitalists that created the railway systems.
	It wasn't socialists.
	And the money system at the moment has changed so much, especially in the last 30 years, but certainly in the last 100 years, that we're going backwards again.
	And I firmly believe that if we was to change, just if I talked about England only, if we was to change our monetary system to a treasury system, and there's a book called Financiers and the Nations.
	It was actually written by an English MP in 1935, where he actually says there are three methods of treasury money.
	And one of them is called the Bradbury Pound, which is the Currency and Notes Act of 1914.
	They financed the First World War with it.
	And yet now, they've took all of that away.
	You can't even buy that book in England anymore.
	I had to buy it from the US. So what I'm saying is, I've got loads of books here.
	You just mentioned the Nazi.
	I've read the books, When Money Dies.
	The point of the monetary system as it is currently in its current form, people in universities and economists are misinstructed of how it actually works.
	And then people come out of universities, they go into government positions, they advise MPs and ministers, etc., and they are advising them incorrectly because they have been misinstructed of how...
	How the monetary system works.
	Oh, I don't think so.
	I mean, you know, I respect, sorry, I just respectfully disagree.
	I don't think anyone's misinformed.
	I don't think anyone's misinstructed.
	I don't think anyone's getting bad advice.
	You give governments what they perceive as free money.
	You give politicians what they perceive as free money.
	I mean, that's all they want.
	I mean, that's all they want.
	It's all they care about.
	And in England in particular, if you were to go to a gold-backed currency system or a Bitcoin-limited currency system, I mean, there would be a revolution.
	I mean, everybody's holding this tiger by the ears.
	You can't let it go.
	You can't vanquish it.
	Which is that entire social structures, demographics, birth rates, immigration, everything has been founded on this infinite supply or perceived infinite supply of free money.
	And, you know, when Germany takes in a million refugees, do taxes go up?
	No.
	They just print money.
	So they get it later through inflation and all that kind of stuff.
	But what happens if...
	If the flow of welfare to third world immigrants in Europe gets cut off, which it would have to be if taxes were, if currency was rationalized, well, there would be mass violence in the streets.
	There would be potential civil wars.
	I mean, all of the stuff that is set up to fail when currency goes south.
	I mean, this is, so, I mean, I don't, you know, I don't believe that they're all misinformed because it's not that hard to be informed about currency.
	And they just They don't want to, like at this point, so many decisions have been made on the infinite flow of free money that if that were to dry up, in other words, if taxes were to largely go to pay off a national debt and very little would be left over for services and none for welfare, what would all of the immigrants do?
	What would they do?
	They would riot.
	They would take to the streets.
	And then what?
	I mean, I don't think it's ignorance.
	I think it's self-interest on the part of the politicians.
	Well, I agree that it's self-interest, but I don't think it's self-interest on the part of the politicians.
	It's the banks.
	Because the banks control the monetary system.
	It's above religion.
	It's above everything.
	Oh, I hate to be the guy who disagrees with you, but no.
	Banks don't have any money.
	They don't have any armies.
	They don't have any police.
	They don't have any weapons.
	How are they above everything?
	I mean, if the politicians change the laws, what's the bank going to do?
	Start rolling out tanks?
	No.
	They're just going to go, okay.
	It's the politicians who have the weapons.
	They're the ones who have the force.
	Well, let me put it this way.
	We've spoken about corporations.
	Corporations and banking, for example, the way the system currently works It is the corporations of the banking corporations.
	For example, there's 80 members of boards in the banks in the UK. They control England's and the United Kingdom's economy, not the MPs.
	Because they invent money.
	And they then give money to the government and charge them interest when they haven't got it in the first place.
	Yeah, but when government changes the role of currency, right?
	So in America, government has confiscated gold, has arbitrarily set the price of gold to the detriment of gold owners.
	And people in America are very well armed, but they didn't do anything because the government has all the guns.
	It's the same thing with the banks.
	I mean, you're going to see like old fluffy Bernie Sanders-haired style bankers with their loathsome spotty behinds lurching out of their executive chairs and taking on the special air service guys who have come to enforce the new currency rules.
	No.
	It's the state.
	It's the state that has the power to change these things.
	And it is an unholy alliance.
	I'll certainly agree with you there, Graham.
	It's an unholy alliance in that The bankers are the new priests, right?
	So in the old formulation before modernity, the priests would give legitimacy to the kings by saying the kings were appointed by God, and therefore to disobey the king was to disobey God, and it was a Christian duty and a moral duty and a religious duty to obey the state, to obey the king, and that legitimized the rulers.
	Now, in return, the rulers would give A monopoly to the priests in general.
	There may be some multiplicity, but in general there would be a monopoly given to the priests for a particular religion or religious, you know, you could say Christianity, which would include a bunch of different denominations, but the priest would get monopoly and the politician, the king, would get legitimacy.
	And it's the same thing with banks.
	Now, banks are just the new priests of money in that the government gives the banks monopoly and The banks give governments the illusion of adding economic value.
	I mean, if you counterfeit, it seems for a moment that everyone's getting wealthier because there's more money in circulation, more goods are moving.
	Once the inflation hits, you realize it was a theft and a robbery.
	But the only way that governments give the illusion of providing value is because of the monopoly they grant to the banksters in money printing.
	And that gives people the idea that the government is somehow paying for something with something other than, or with money other than money they've taken from.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I appreciate the call.
	For me, I love talking about the banking and all that kind of stuff.
	And it is a topic that people can really, really enormously profit from diving into because it's really impossible to understand the state without understanding how it's financed and how it's financed is in a grim, violent, coercive monopoly of doom.
	So I appreciate the call.
	Really enjoyable.
	And let's move on to the next.
	Thank you.
	Alright, up next we have Ace.
	Ace wrote in and said, And a sweeping addendum on masculinity.
	What is your most educated opinion when asked, do you think there has been a concerted effort to destroy Western people?
	If so, who?
	And why?
	If not, do you think the eminent decline has more to do with the beautiful rats theory, which leads back to R versus K selection theory?
	That's from Ace.
	Well, hello, Ace.
	How are you doing tonight?
	I'm doing good.
	I have a half a glass of scotch and I've been enjoying the last three callers.
	How full was your scotch glass when we started the call?
	Well, the definition of full...
	It's less full now than when we started.
	It is.
	Alright.
	Well, what do you think of these questions?
	I'm very concerned, I have to say.
	When I was younger, in my earlier days, young, dumb, full of expletive, I joined the Marine Corps thinking I would be a bastion of protecting the West, protecting the Republic.
	I took civics class very seriously in public school.
	I grew up in a pretty impoverished area of rural America.
	And I was a minority in my school.
	I'm an ethnically European male.
	Public school was essentially babysitting for me.
	Once I started hitting puberty, which was about two years after everybody else, I started to disregard classes.
	I made B's and C's, just not even caring.
	Flew into college, no big deal.
	Decided I wanted to do history because my family members were so intimately involved with understanding culture, politics, current events, group psychology.
	I got kind of incubated with that stuff from an early age, even in rural America.
	But I did connect with The last caller, Graham, and his concerns with central banking and creating value from nothing, which I didn't really learn until, I would say, my junior and senior year of university.
	I had a professor who was an avowed communist who I actually agreed with on quite a few things not related to economics.
	And it was a combined class with history and philosophy, one of the greatest class ever.
	It was a dual credit class and from there it's just been serving active duty military and witnessing.
	I can literally say that I've been witnessing all the things not to do to have a fighting force, which is one reason why I want to stay anonymous on this show.
	Is it because of the career consequences that come along with speaking out of turn?
	So, yeah, that's how I feel about that so far.
	Right, right.
	And what are your thoughts about the decay of the West and who may be responsible for it?
	If it's engineered, if it's something that is the result of dominoes falling in the past or something that's being engineered in the present?
	There is a definite link that I can see from spirit cooking and the way the left side of politics has been working.
	There's no conversation really.
	You can talk about NFL football and first downs until you're red in the eye or bleeding from the ears, but what are you really talking about?
	And it seems that I would say out of 100 peers of mine, professional military professionals, profession of arms, we study how to do a multitude of things that are not the It's not the average IQ person that does these things.
	This is more on the high end, high stress, critically thinking, takes you a couple of weeks to wind down from an operation.
	And I would say out of those hundred people who are my peers, maybe half of them see the light, which is pretty frightening for what we do.
	Now, a concerted effort to take down the West, I think, would be People who want change for the sake of pulling more resources into their orbit.
	And you see it in language and you see it in the deception.
	It's one of the fundamentals of psychological operations is that you attack the culture over time slowly like a frog in water.
	You just keep turning the temperature up.
	And they don't even feel the change.
	And the West was a very powerful institution.
	Yeah, it couldn't be taken down militarily, right?
	No, absolutely not.
	Yeah, it had to be taken down philosophically or culturally.
	Absolutely, and that's why when you said in one of your shows, Communism didn't die with the USSR, as a matter of fact, if you look You know, into some of the deeper details of the agreements made between the SPD and the DDR, you know, with the reunification of Germany, a lot of those Gestapo, or not Gestapo, but a lot of the secret agents and the professionals that were communists in Eastern Europe and Germany got university tenured positions.
	And they started influencing the West, not economically anymore, just like my philosophy professor.
	She couldn't teach economics, even though she tried to espouse it in a history and philosophy class.
	She tried to influence me that way.
	Well, I mean, if you look at when South America went to shit, it was when the Nazis all fled Germany and went to South America.
	So they bring the National Socialism to South America, and this is why Argentina and other countries, the growth stopped, and it all started to decline, and It's a rock from within.
	The castle walls can stand anything from outside, it's just that the sinkhole from inside takes down the whole city.
	Correct.
	And I sympathize with Graham's opinion on fractional reserve banking.
	I think that there's an unholy alliance for sure, but at the same time, it is politicians making the decisions.
	But if you take Timothy Geithner, for example, he was working at Goldman Sachs for years and years, and then, you know, oh, he would be the best person to be at Treasury or the best person to work at the Federal Reserve because he knows the system so well.
	Well, he probably understands that corporations like that last longer than most governments do.
	And that's a good investment to make.
	Right.
	To pull the United States government into the orbit of global banking cartels, which, as you can see, our politicians are most clearly linked to.
	Thank you, Julian Assange.
	Yeah.
	Pretty heavy stuff.
	I would say it's been a godsend to have your podcast broadcast daily.
	I download it in podcasts and I listen to it on the way to work and it's just like we're brothers from another mother or something.
	You're speaking my language for sure.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	I mean, that's great to hear.
	And, you know, we are both warriors, although your chance of shrapnel is slightly higher than mine.
	Well, you know, sometimes I should say I get a sliver.
	Paper cuts.
	So, yeah, we're on pretty much the same page.
	But, no, I appreciate your kind words.
	Yeah, I mean, it is, of course, a great question.
	What is bringing down Western civilization?
	And, you know, I've heard theories, oh, it's the Jews, and I think, I mean...
	I don't fundamentally accept that because somebody has to...
	Let's say Jews produce a lot of movies, a lot of television.
	Somebody's got to watch them.
	Somebody's got to buy them.
	Nobody's forcing them to buy or watch these things, right?
	So I don't buy that fundamentally.
	I don't fundamentally buy that it's women and the vote.
	I think these are factors.
	I mean, the women and the vote thing is a factor.
	But...
	No, it's, you know, and I sort of hate to get, I just came off this call with Mike Cernovich in Vox Dei where we talked about evil with this sort of spirit cooking stuff and this satanic stuff and monstrous, monstrous evil stuff that's going on.
	It's alleged to be going on in the world these days, which we'll find out about hopefully sooner rather than later about the facts.
	But it is the old temptation of the devil himself.
	And the devil himself wishes to pull you out of reality by offering you something for nothing.
	Once the devil can pull you out of reality by offering you something for nothing, then you become dependent upon that lie.
	The devil appeared in the form of government schools, originally, and then in the form of central banks.
	They said, you can have something for nothing.
	You can have money with no gold.
	You can have money without limit.
	You can have something for nothing.
	I don't know exactly why.
	Maybe it was government schools, maybe it was something else.
	I don't know why people fell for the something-for-nothing bullshit.
	Because that's all it really comes down to.
	Well, isn't that American exceptionalism now?
	Well, no, because it was around the world.
	Yeah, I know.
	Right?
	I mean, the First World War came along, all the Allied powers either had instituted or utilized central banks.
	They all stripped their convertibility of currency to gold.
	And so, something-for-nothing.
	There's nothing more dangerous than something for nothing.
	Because it takes you out of the natural, primal, animal state of reality.
	Tell me about it.
	Where things require effort and fruit, at least in Europe, doesn't fall in your lap 24-7.
	Something for nothing.
	That's the great danger.
	You can have something for nothing.
	Magic.
	Well, as soon as you get sold on magic, you get enslaved to the sorcerer who has to continue to provide that magic.
	And...
	I have, and I just finished this three-hour presentation on the rise of Nazism, where I take some of the philosophers, for want of a better word, who paved the way for Nazism.
	The collectivists, the mystics, the anti-rationalists, the will to power people, or the world spirit that inhabits nations and allows them to dominate others morally and so on.
	And it is up To ferocious intellectuals to keep the people safe.
	I mean, I'm sure you have this perspective when you look upon the sheep of humanity that you are a sheepdog who keeps the wolves at bay, right?
	Absolutely.
	I mean, that's the role of the military, right?
	I mean, that's why there's the military.
	It's the old Jack Nicholson line from A Few Good Men.
	You know, who's going to stand on that wall?
	You?
	There are bad people out there who want to do bad things to you, and I stand between you and those bad people.
	And for me...
	Combat philosophy is all that matters.
	There are terrible, destructive, vicious, and, new word for my vocabulary, truly satanic perspectives and ideas out there in the world.
	And it is up to combat philosophers to basically pick up the shiv and do some wet work on these terrible ideas.
	It's never about the people.
	Who cares about the people?
	They're merely vehicles for the poison.
	And it is up to those who have the capacity, the wit, the rigor, the charisma, the enthusiasm, the excellence and execution in language to take civilization-destroying ideas out back and shoot them.
	And you don't shoot them in the head.
	Because that's too quick.
	That's right.
	A nice belly shot.
	That's right.
	You know, where your acids mix up with your innards.
	Like something slow.
	That's right.
	You know, like that old Johnny Cash thing.
	I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
	Well, no.
	I'm a wet work specialist in the elimination of bad ideas.
	And I mean, I know I make lots of jokes and all of that, but I take that deadly seriously.
	Because if people don't If intellectuals, if smart people, and you're a brother with me that way too, if smart people aren't willing to take on bad ideas, bad ideas overwhelm and take down civilization.
	And it's happened over and over and over again.
	It's not the Jews, and it's not women, and it's not the welfare state.
	These are all symptoms.
	I'm not putting them all in the same category to the same level of effectiveness.
	There are some women who fight for freedom.
	There are lots of Jews who said...
	You know, this something for nothing is bullshit and it's going to destroy you.
	I mean, so many of the free market economists were Jewish.
	Oh, but the Jews were like, come on.
	They were very cunning at warning us then of how dangerous the something for nothing was.
	There is an over-representation, but I don't find that it's a...
	Because they're smart.
	Yeah.
	They're culturally engaged academics and philosophy, but...
	I can tell you there's officers in the Marine Corps that I'm peers with that are Jewish and they're no different.
	Yeah, I bet you they kick as much ass as anyone.
	Exactly.
	Jews are smart, particularly language-wise, and I've gone over the biological and cultural reasons for that on the show before.
	Jews are smart.
	So what?
	Be smarter.
	If you think that's such a terrible influence, go be smarter.
	I am.
	Go do better.
	Yeah, of course, yeah.
	I mean, you know, the Jews, whoever, the cabal, just go be better.
	Go be smarter.
	You know, we still have Shakespeare, right?
	And Dickens.
	So, this, you know, in a sense, I don't care if there's some big ulterior motive to take down the West or if there's secret meetings or cabals.
	I don't care.
	I don't care.
	I just want to have big enough guns to make it go away.
	And that's intellectual firepower.
	And that's me being rigorous and courageous and well-researched and humble and charismatic as I can be and taking risks and doing new topics and keeping people stimulated.
	God, I was just talking about this with Mike the other day, about how it seems like a lot of people in the media, I mean, I guess I can say I've got a fairly long career by now, 10 years in the alternative media and all, and I still love what I do because it's new.
	Because I'm constantly exploring new ideas, new solutions, new arguments, and I don't know how the people do it where it seems like the same show over and over again.
	I respect what they do, and that kind of repetition can be very helpful to people.
	But...
	Staying stimulated, staying active, staying engaged, staying interesting.
	Oh, Lord.
	Staying interesting.
	That's the challenge, right?
	I mean, sometimes, I mean, I hope that you don't, like, put on the next show saying, oh, I know exactly what he's going to say.
	That'd be pretty tragic, right?
	But, so, yeah, I think that I don't care who's, you know, who, if anyone, or any group has got it in for worse than civilization.
	You know, it's like, oh, well, you know, women don't know much about politics.
	It's like, okay, then tell them that.
	And tell them, if they don't know what they're talking about, they don't know what they're talking about.
	Beta males will never do that.
	Okay, then tell beta males that they're cucks and useless and, you know, about as handy to civilization as tits on a bull, and they need to get out of the way or grow a pair, to put it bluntly.
	And just, you know, be blunt and be, you know...
	Beta males have got their stuff to do.
	Somebody's got to guard the harem, I guess.
	But just be blunt.
	When I was bad at stuff, people would tell me.
	And that's stuff we all need to hear so we can focus our efforts on the stuff we're good at.
	I do.
	I think in the army they're pretty clear, unless you're a woman or a minority whose numbers you have to get up.
	I'm sure in the army for the most part they say, you suck!
	One of the most embarrassing experiences of my professional career, I was having a pretty heated, well attended meeting about some joint level stuff between a few countries and my counterpart Who I had heard about beforehand, who I was essentially going to be engaging directly with negotiations for a few important things.
	Her name was, you know, Lisa, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
	Well, Lisa showed up and sat across from me in this, you know, this other military uniform, and it was totally a six foot two fat dude on hormones trying to fake a female voice.
	And I tried my hardest not to be surprised, but I failed.
	I kind of lost a bit of bearing, got red in the face, because I was ready to engage and be very to the point.
	And it actually shook me a bit.
	So in negotiations, it was kind of an effective tool.
	I eventually won the negotiation, but it was a curveball, to say the least.
	But the entire...
	The entire sexual structure of what is and is not feasible or possible or medically qualifying in the military profession has changed and it's just like,
	it's no rules, it's completely subjective, which is anything subjective It's very counterintuitive to the lower ranks in the military because if you breed any sort of subjectivity, the next thing you have is resentment because things can be looked at and viewed at in a multiplicity of different ways, and it's hard to maintain discipline if everybody sees things differently.
	Which goes back to diversity in the ranks where, you know, it just adds another layer of red tape for people who are responsible for organizing, moving, and conquering targets.
	Now, on the other hand, depending on what type of unit or your specialty is, it's actually relatively easy to get that stuff going, but it's not blanketed throughout the military.
	So you can't talk about everything.
	You can't have deep discussions about anything.
	So what you have is a fostering environment of superficiality, insecurity, loss of connection.
	And it takes a lot of experience to actually get that bond, kind of like a warrior bond where it's implicit communication across the field.
	You don't have to yell across the field.
	You just know that person is trained to do a certain thing and they're going to do it and they'll be there even if you can't see them.
	Well, yeah, but wouldn't it be fair to say as well, and I've had some soldiers call into the show about this, that political correctness has done a good deal of harm to trust in the military because you don't know if people are there because they're competent or because of political correctness.
	And the level of trust you need, of course, in the military is extraordinarily high.
	And I've had some people say that it does undermine unity and trust and cohesion in the unit because some people you have to carry.
	Correct.
	I look at the numbers.
	I'm privileged in my position to look at some interesting statistics.
	The definition for minority versus majority, as far as racial diversity is, is that in most units, the white male is actually the minority, but he's described and defined as the majority because he's the biggest minority, right?
	He's the biggest minority, but he hasn't reached 49% or even 50%, which is what it takes, 51% to be the majority.
	So when you have political rhetoric and CNN and Fox and mainstream media being very divisive, people pick that up.
	The Marine Corps specifically does a really, really good job of formulating its own culture much, much, much better than the Air Force or the Army does just because of our mission.
	Wait, hang on.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	I just wanted to make a note here that for everyone who knows, at this day, upon this time, Somebody from the Marines said that they did something better than the Air Force or the Army.
	That's rare.
	And I just wanted people to be aware that this moment in time had occurred.
	Now, please, please continue.
	I knew you were going to pick up on that.
	I'm very happy you paused me to do that.
	But it's different.
	But we're still held to the same rules because we're all under the same government.
	And I understand that.
	It makes our job harder.
	And our mission is changing.
	It's going to be an interesting...
	Well, actually, it's going to be an interesting four days, but after that, I would even say the morphing of the military is going to be interesting to watch in the next one year to five years to ten years if I decide to stay in.
	Right.
	So, I mean, the machinations of the enemy can never be known, and if there is an enemy, I think in this case, can never be particularly known.
	What matters is...
	To hell with the enemy, let's just arm ourselves as well as possible and, you know, trust in our resolution.
	Because a lot of people seem to spend a lot of time trying to dig up these enemies that are undoing Western civilization.
	So what if you find them?
	What's the solution?
	Let's say you find a group of redhead people in a bunker who are, you know, trying to figure out what are you going to do?
	I mean, so what?
	So people are going to say, well, they still want free stuff from the government, right?
	They still want advantageous legislation for them and their buddies.
	They still want a military-industrial complex to profit off war.
	So even if you do find some cabal of redheaded people in a bunker who are plotting the demise of Western civilization, what are you going to do about it?
	The problems that you would have to solve exist regardless of their source.
	And it's not like, well, if you, you know, let's say you find these people and, I don't know, they did something illegal and you could throw them all in jail.
	Well, all of the systems that they put in place are still there.
	All the perverse incentives that screw up society and civilization are all still there.
	You're still going to have to undo it all.
	And I bet you there's not one goddamn person in the world or in the West who's on welfare and has messed up their life.
	Maybe some woman, she's got like four kids by four guys.
	And you go to this woman and you say, ah, well, you know, I know that you're getting all this welfare and you're getting all these benefits and you'd have to work in the welfare cliff.
	You have to make $80,000 a year just to make up for all the free stuff you're getting.
	But did you know that this whole welfare scheme, this whole welfare setup with this bunch of redheaded guys in a bunker?
	So you're fine giving it up now, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, God.
	Yeah.
	I don't think so.
	Who cares who started it?
	Who cares who's managing it?
	The incentives are all going to be there.
	The mess is all going to be there.
	Even if you find this magical cabal of people, you're still going to have to solve the problem.
	And so I don't care.
	Finding the cabal, revealing some cabal, some conspiracy, whatever.
	Maybe, I don't know, massive numbers of people up in the U.S. government are like these crazy Satanists.
	Maybe?
	Well...
	Bunch of British MPs turned out to be pedophiles.
	Did that shrink the welfare state?
	Did that change government schools into private schools?
	No.
	Did that change anything about central banking or national debt?
	No.
	No, it did not.
	So I don't care about the cabal because even if I believed in them and even if I found them and even if they were brought wriggling to the light and prosecuted and so on, so what?
	Oh, come on.
	You know...
	Still got to fix all the problems.
	You know you want to see Hillary Clinton indicted and struck.
	Oh, okay.
	Now, if you're talking about my particular...
	Celebrity crush.
	Now, that normally means that you have an affinity, you know, like Mike Cernovich with Huma Abedin.
	But this is my celebrity crush.
	I just use the word in a different context with Hillary Clinton.
	So, look, I get that, but that's because, you know, she's about to get into power and all of that.
	She's not a cabal.
	She's like out front.
	You have to find her in a bunker, although you may actually...
	Maybe she'd be the first president to accept the presidency from a non-extradition country in the Middle East.
	I don't know.
	I've always wondered, and I deal directly with a lot of the relationship understandings for that sort of stuff, and I don't know why we...
	Have such strong alliances with places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
	I mean, I understand they let us have bases there and, you know, run operations, but at the same time, it's sort of a moral hazard if it were to ever get out WikiLeaks and completely undermine the credibility.
	But at the same time, maybe it's completely irrational since the American public doesn't see that much, you know, they don't have that much foresight.
	WikiLeaks, I think, is a fantastic thing for uncovering that cabal that I think is valuable for understanding from a cultural, historical perspective, because I don't think the migrant crisis was a mistake.
	I don't think that after almost two decades of war in the Middle East, all of a sudden there was a migrant crisis.
	I mean, the taking out of Gaddafi, the taking out of Destabilizing Syria and allowing a NATO partner like Turkey's Erdogan to take power and then him control Angela Merkel trying to get free visas into Europe and Angela Merkel just bending over and taking it.
	We don't know.
	Maybe some Saudi royalty or maybe some Middle Eastern royalty bailed out.
	Don't you think?
	Maybe she's part of some horrible cabal and they have stuff on her.
	I've heard that the Qataris were looking at investing into Deutsche Bank to give it some liquidity, but I could never confirm it.
	Of course, I mean, until somebody uses P ampersand S word as password and somebody guesses that, I'll figure it out.
	But, you know, for me, some cabal or not, what is it going to change in what I do every day?
	All the time I spend trying to ferret out some cabal is time I'm not out there making better arguments that already exist whether the cabal is there or gone tomorrow.
	So I don't want to...
	I mean, that's not...
	It won't do any good.
	It won't do any good for me.
	And again, there are some people who do it and I don't think it's a bad thing.
	I mean, some people are better suited for that kind of stuff and maybe there is a value in it that I can't see.
	So I don't want to sort of say, well, anyone who looks into a cabal is wasting their time and so on.
	It's not my wheelhouse.
	My wheelhouse is to be much more...
	Combative and creative in the opposition of the ideas that are, rather than trying to maybe plug the source or something.
	I think the source is so wide and disseminated now.
	As you say, it's the movies, it's the TV, it's the academics, it's the mainstream media, it's politics.
	All these ideas are so spread out by now that shutting off the source isn't going to...
	Hey, I found the stream that started the ocean.
	I've plugged it.
	Well, still got an ocean now, haven't we?
	So we've got to deal with that.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Well, I appreciate your opinion for sure.
	I super, super support your show, what you're doing.
	I think the last time I've been stimulated to this extent was my philosopher My philosophy class in college, where I took...
	What, nothing about a hot date?
	Oh, come on.
	Oh, well, that's a different sort of stimulation, which I also...
	You had a caller not too long ago.
	Her name was Luisa.
	I think she was from Sweden.
	Yeah, she said she was having poor dating experiences.
	Yeah.
	Well, I'll have to say that it's awful in America.
	I've dated a few European women.
	Only one of those turned out to be Americanized, as I like to put it.
	The other two were very understanding.
	They weren't nearly as bad as I expected.
	But just the distance and my occupation and their occupations kind of got in the way.
	But listen, Ace, like most Marines, the best thing to do is to ask the guys in the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy how to get dates because I think those guys have really got it down and I'm sure you could use their expertise.
	I'm just kidding.
	Oh, no.
	I like the joke, but it's just not true.
	All right.
	Well, thanks, Ace, for the call.
	You're welcome back anytime.
	It was really enjoyable, but we're going to move on to the next caller now.
	All right, Stefan.
	Take care.
	Thanks, man.
	Alright, up next we have Justin.
	Justin wrote in and said, Is this definition of philosophy not the same as saying something is existent and nonexistent at the same time?
	Shouldn't a logical definition of a word still be used to define said word?
	I believe that the definition is not applicable as definitions of word should have some objective merits.
	Am I misguided in this belief?
	That's from Justin.
	Justin time!
	Justin, welcome.
	How are you doing?
	I'm doing well.
	How about yourself?
	I am doing well.
	I am...
	Looking forward to the question.
	So first, of course, if we're going to talk about philosophy and what it means, what is your definition, my brother, of philosophy?
	I'd have to go with my personal definition would be like the traditional definition that it's the study of knowledge and experience.
	But as I'm to understand, you know, every dictionary you can read online, Merriam-Webster, Yeah, that's not for me.
	I mean, for me, it would be the study of truth according to reason and evidence.
	That would be what philosophy is.
	The study of belief, well, I mean, an anthropologist studies belief, but we would not call an anthropologist a philosopher.
	The study of experience.
	Well, a biographer studies experience, but we would not call that person a philosopher.
	So I would have to go with, you know, pursuit of truth according to reason and evidence.
	That would be my...
	The way that I would work would determine if you're comfortable working with that term or you want to modify it, that's perfectly fine, of course.
	Then we can start from there.
	Well, you could have a study of systems or patterns of anthropology or...
	Writing.
	That wouldn't really...
	An anthropologist can study from outside of what's evident.
	He can make connections between...
	I don't know enough about anthropology to give an example, but Sorry, just to be clear, an anthropologist can balance his checkbook.
	That doesn't make him a mathematician.
	And an anthropologist can use reason and evidence in pursuit of truth.
	It has to be your primary occupation or what you do with the majority of your time.
	I play tennis.
	I'm not a professional tennis player.
	So if we can work with the pursuit of truth according to reason and evidence, And now, I understand that this, of course, is an umbrella term for other disciplines as well.
	I mean, science, of course, is the pursuit of truth according to reason and evidence.
	But philosophy is the mother of all disciplines, at least all objective disciplines.
	And so I have no problem with philosophy being an umbrella term which would include subsections according to...
	Particularly the empirical subsections like the physical sciences and biology and so on.
	So if we can sort of start with that as a way of viewing philosophy, then we can move into the criticisms you might have of that terminology.
	Okay, no, no, I'm willing to accept your definition of philosophy as the logical...
	Pursuit of truth according to reason and evidence.
	Or using reason and evidence.
	Pursuit of truth according to reason and evidence.
	So...
	So there's a few things embedded in that which is worth breaking out.
	Because, I mean, the words are like the tip of the iceberg, right?
	I mean, there's lots of stuff underneath it.
	So the pursuit means that it's not an automatic process, right?
	Like when I sleep, my breathing, my heart rate, they're all automatic processes.
	I wouldn't say I'm in pursuit of a heart rate, but it just kind of happens, right?
	So the pursuit of truth means that it's not an automatic process and it requires...
	The truth is not automatic to the human mind.
	Instincts are more automatic to animals, but truth is not automatic to the human mind.
	So the pursuit of truth, just like the pursuit of happiness, right?
	The founding fathers didn't guarantee happiness, but the pursuit of happiness.
	So the pursuit of truth, according to reason and evidence, well, what that says is that for something to be true...
	It needs to accord with reason and evidence.
	And since reason is derived from the consistent behavior of matter and energy, then we're saying that truth is something that exists outside of the mind, which we must pursue, and the only way to be certain we have it is if our hypotheses or our claims for truth accord with reason and evidence.
	Now, you could say reason and or evidence, but since you really have to have a hypothesis or an idea or an argument in order to be in the realm of philosophy, I think we'd have to say I mean, you can create a theoretical construct that, like UPB, I mean, you could say that there's some evidence in general for it, but universally preferable behavior, my sort of theory of ethics, which people can find at freedomainradio.com slash free, well, is there an empirical test for it?
	Well, it's a sort of syllogism.
	And so the reason first, and then Evidence if necessary.
	So applying your definition of philosophy to linguistics, language, and as an example, the word philosophy, you're saying it's the pursuit of truth regarding some kind of empirical rationale behind it.
	Dude, do you need to write this down?
	We've gone over this like five times now.
	Please, just write it down, because if we keep going, if I keep having to go over the definition, I've got to go slowly mental.
	The pursuit of truth according to reason and evidence.
	Okay.
	Or using the standard of reason and evidence.
	Reason and evidence, yeah.
	Yeah, truth, reason, evidence.
	Okay.
	Just write those down, it'll be fine.
	All right, so the pursuit of reason and evidence behind linguistics, I mean, is there...
	Wait, no.
	The pursuit of truth, not the pursuit of reason and evidence.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	Are you tired?
	I am tired.
	Do you need a coffee?
	I haven't had a coffee in a good few hours, so...
	All right.
	Well, if you need a coffee, you might want to look into your consumption, but all right.
	Go ahead.
	All right, so...
	So, linguistics.
	Okay, now, first of all, I'm sorry to be annoying, but what do you mean by linguistics?
	The usage of words, language, in general.
	I mean...
	Syntax.
	But how is it different from language?
	Linguistics and language?
	Why not just use the word language?
	Language is the use of words.
	We can say language?
	Yes, the philosophy of language.
	Okay.
	That's easier.
	Because linguistics, we get all chomps.
	I get confused.
	Okay.
	So let's go with language.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Okay, so...
	There's no real...
	Well, I guess you could apply reason to...
	But, I mean, a truth behind language.
	I don't...
	Is that something so binary that language can be true?
	What do we mean?
	Hang on, hang on.
	A truth behind language?
	I don't even know what that means.
	Can we break it down to something a bit more empirical or a bit...
	This is all very abstract, and I don't know what it means.
	And you're going on as if I do, right?
	What the hell does the truth behind language mean?
	And you can explain it, but if you want to put something out there, make sure I understand it before we go forward.
	Do you agree that it's possible to have a philosophy of language?
	A philosophy of language?
	That's an interesting question.
	I don't know.
	A philosophy of language.
	What is the truth about language?
	Yes, yes, yes, I think so.
	Yeah, actually, I think so, because that's related to metaphysics and epistemology, because you would need to figure out the degree to which language accurately reflects reality, right?
	So when I say a rock, how big is it?
	What color is it?
	Where is it?
	What kind is it?
	These things could all be quite confusing.
	So yes, given that language is always an imperfect representation of reality, though not necessarily of logic, I think the deviations between language and reality, or the ambivalence between language and that which it describes, would be well worth philosophical examination after we solve the problem of evil.
	So yes, I think philosophy of language could be cool.
	All right, so to say that...
	I guess this is kind of jumping around a little bit, but saying that a word has two...
	Two definitions that, in the same usage of a word, regardless of context, that the word means two opposite things, that doesn't conform to rationale.
	That's not reasonable, I don't believe.
	Okay, can you give me an example?
	All right, so this was the jumping-off point from where all this comes from.
	Me and my friend were talking, and he says that if someone, say, with some mental disorder believes that they were abducted by aliens, he could live his life believing that he was abducted by aliens, and that could be classified as his philosophy.
	I disagree, because there's nothing...
	Yeah, exactly, yeah.
	But...
	Yeah, no.
	That certainly is not the pursuit of truth according to reason and evidence.
	Yeah, no, under that definition of...
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, yeah, if you narrow it down to one definition, but definitions are...
	No, it's not narrowing it.
	You say narrowing like it's a pejorative, like narrow-minded.
	It's precision, right?
	No, no, no.
	Yeah, no, I agree with that.
	I meant more of kind of cutting off the dead weight, I guess.
	But I mean, definitions of words are kind of...
	You don't want philosophy to be stuff people believe.
	We already have a word for that.
	It's called belief.
	And parsimony of language is important.
	It's important not to unnecessarily multiply words or concepts, really.
	It's...
	And so that's why when you started talking about linguistics, I'm like, well, can we just use the word language?
	It's like, yes, okay, good, right?
	And so I don't want to, if there already is the word belief, which is a perspective held in someone's mind that they think is true or valid, well, we already have the word belief, so let's not confuse the word belief with philosophy any more than we would confuse throwing something with physics or Lego with engineering, right?
	I mean, we already have Words for things, we shouldn't conflate words together, because philosophy, of course, is a rigorous pursuit of truth, reason and evidence and all that, and belief just can be anything that people accept as true, and we don't want to mistake those two.
	Okay, I would say that's...
	Like cosmology versus physics, right?
	Cosmology is just the way people think the universe runs.
	It could be on the back of a turtle.
	It could be that the Earth is the center of the universe.
	It could be flat, with the robot penguin guards around the perimeter, as you may recall from the wonderful conversation I had with the flat Earth fellow.
	So cosmology is what people believe about the universe and the world, but physics or astronomy would be more of a rigorous examination of the sense data and information about the universe.
	I agree with that definition, but I mean, I'd have to say that language is as valid as its usage.
	I mean, the reason words are defined as what they are is due to their usage.
	I mean, I assume because it's in every dictionary source you can look up that there's a pretty wide usage of philosophy just as any held belief.
	Sure.
	I care about the general, right?
	I mean, why would I care about what is generally in dictionaries?
	I mean, historical implements used generally in the realm of values used generally to confuse rather than to illuminate.
	So...
	Yeah, I mean, the dictionary games to me are always a challenge, right?
	Like, I could have gone and looked up a definition of philosophy and said, okay, well, here's the definition of philosophy I read here or here or here.
	But I, you know, I don't, I don't care.
	You know, I want to make a case clearly as clearly as I can in the moment or in the present.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	I was just agreeing with you.
	That's not what philosophy is about, is looking up and seeing what other people have to say about stuff.
	It's about formulating your own rigorous pursuit of truth through reasoning.
	Something else, I bet.
	Whatever you want.
	Sorry.
	Oh, no, no.
	Yeah, I guess that's...
	So go back to your friend and say, this is a definition of philosophy.
	And of course, we can always test that definition of philosophy.
	This is the old Socratic method.
	You come up with a definition of something, and then you test that definition to see if it holds against different cases and all that.
	And if you come up with a better one, then please let me know.
	I would certainly appreciate that.
	But that would be what I would work with.
	And I think if you take that approach, it will eliminate a lot of confusion about philosophy.
	How things can work in our mind and in the world, and in the minds and arguments of those around us.
	All right.
	I know that...
	So you could say, like if you said something, sorry to interrupt, but you know, somebody says, God exists.
	Well, that's not a philosophical statement.
	It may be, it's not the pursuit of truth.
	It's an assertion.
	It's an assertion, and an assertion is not philosophy.
	In fact, it's the opposite of philosophy.
	Because it is the assertion of a truth rather than the pursuit of truth and it uses no reason and evidence but rather usually a subtle form of intimidation or bribery.
	So these, you know, does the government exist, right?
	These are things you can figure out with regards to reason and evidence.
	So if you have that as a starting place, I think you can go to some pretty cool places and you can eliminate a lot of fairly unproductive discussions with friends about space aliens and other things which are not.
	Particularly philosophical.
	Does that help?
	Is it a good place to start with your friend?
	Yeah, I believe so.
	I'm just still kind of milling over your definition of philosophy.
	Reason and...
	So, by reason, I assume you mean it's rational, logically consistent with itself.
	It's internal consistency with its own premises and arguments.
	And based off evidence?
	So factual...
	Well, evidence is how we get reason, right?
	Because reason says that things need to be objective and universal and non-contradictory, and we get that by looking at matter, right?
	The reason we have concepts is because there are atoms, and atoms behave in predictable ways, and that's why we have concepts.
	Concepts are that which unite atoms and purpose, right?
	So we know a rock because it shares atoms with other rocks.
	We know a chair not because it shares wood with a tree, but because it shares It's form with the purpose of the person who makes the chair.
	And so it is from the consistency of matter that we get the need for consistency in our ideas.
	Since our ideas, when we're talking philosophically, our ideas have to match what's in the world.
	What's in the world is consistent, and therefore our ideas must be consistent.
	My ideas can no more be contradictory Then a chair can be an elephant at the same time.
	That would be a contradiction in matter, which never happens.
	I know people come up with this quantum magic and gold and all that, but quantum has nothing to do with sense data.
	Science is focused on quantum, philosophy is focused on sense data, because that's where the philosophical...
	Virtues exist.
	They don't exist at the subatomic level.
	They exist at the sense level.
	And, like, if you stab a guy in the side, you don't get to say, well, most of the atoms in the knife are very far apart, and it's a lot of space.
	And most of the atoms in his side are very far apart, and there's a lot of space.
	So, really, I didn't stab him at all.
	It was just atoms passing through and coming back.
	Yeah, I mean, good luck with that.
	Unless you have Deepak Chopra in the jury booth, you're not going to have much luck with that.
	Yeah, so philosophy works at the sense level, and all of the quantum phenomena all cancel each other way out long before you get to sense data.
	So the consistency of reason is derived from the consistency of matter, and therefore anything which you're using to describe things in the world must be consistent, otherwise it can't be describing what's in the world.
	Well, because conservation of energy and stable properties of atoms and so on is what we base everything on.
	If that stability didn't exist, neither would we.
	Okay.
	Well...
	Hold on.
	Well, given the original example of, say, someone with a brain damage believes they're abducted by aliens and lives their life believing they're abducted by aliens and makes decisions of believing they're abducted by aliens, that would, even though they didn't physically get abducted by aliens, there was an experience...
	Triggered by whatever brain damage that led to them having an internally consistent belief that they were abducted by aliens.
	So under...
	Sure, but there are people who've lost a limb who have phantom pain in that limb.
	Right?
	Their limb can itch, their limb can ache, and so on.
	And so they have...
	A subjective experience, like if they close their eyes or maybe when they're waking up from a dream or whatever, right?
	They have a subjective experience that they have a limb, but they don't have a limb.
	They don't have a limb.
	You don't buy them two gloves, right?
	I mean, I guess you could, but it'd be kind of cruel.
	So that wouldn't qualify under your definition of evidence.
	Somebody's subjective experience, yeah, somebody's subjective experience based on damage doesn't matter.
	Like, they can open up your skull and they can put electrodes into your brain and they can stimulate religious experiences for you.
	Yep.
	And cherubs and angels and flying, I mean, they can really, a sense of oneness and unity, similar to epilepsy, if I understand it, and it's been a while since I've read this stuff, so please feel free to look it up yourself, but, yeah, electrical stimulation can produce religious experiences in people, and I guess if you had those electrical experiences without some outside probe, you would believe it came from outside your brain, but...
	That's not evidence.
	That would be a hypothesis, right?
	So this guy would have a hypothesis I was abducted by space aliens and it's possible, like that's internally, the hypothesis is not necessarily inconsistent with reality.
	There could be space aliens and they could be abducting people.
	I mean, it's within the realm of physical possibility.
	And that would be a hypothesis and you would look for a It's the simplest and most likely explanation.
	And if the person did experience brain damage, then we would look at that and see if that were the case.
	I mean, so for instance, like if somebody's arm is missing and it's giving them phantom pain, one explanation could be that their arm has been replaced by a ghost arm that does exist, but in another dimension.
	Okay, that would be a hypothesis, and you would test for that.
	And the evidence wouldn't be that there's a ghost arm.
	Right, there's no arm.
	And the phantom pain is well understood.
	Like if you have a hearing problem, you can get tinnitus, right?
	Because your brain, if you stop hearing certain frequencies, you can get tinnitus because your brain still wants to hear those frequencies, so it produces them themselves.
	Or you could say, there's a tiny space alien spaceship trapped in my ear that's invisible to science that's producing this sound as the byproduct of its quantum drive, which is the most likely sound.
	Uh, explanation.
	And, uh, that's probably the one you'd want to go with.
	That's interesting.
	I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember.
	And that's, uh, I never really knew what...
	Oh, do you know the course?
	No, no, I didn't know.
	What you said was true about, uh, your brain, or whatever, your ear not being able to...
	Is it a problem with the inner ear, or is it a neurological thing?
	My understanding, like, I'm just going through a bit of an ear thing, and it's not bad or anything, but my understanding is that, um...
	It may be, and you should probably go get your hearing tested.
	It's not a bad thing to do, depending on your age.
	But if you've got tinnitus, you can go and you can find out.
	And my understanding is it's not a problem with the nerve endings.
	It's a problem within the brain.
	The brain's expecting a certain sound, and if it doesn't get it from the ears, it starts producing it itself.
	You can, just by the by, if you're interested, you can go on YouTube and you can look at tinnitus sounds and you can put them on.
	Sometimes the white noise can help diminish the tinnitus or whatever, so...
	Something on to go to sleep.
	I can't without it in the silence, really.
	Is it like a mosquito wine kind of thing?
	It's like, it's not that high as a thing.
	It's kind of like, you know, it's high, but mid-range amongst high, if that makes any sense.
	It's kind of low, from what I've heard of.
	Well, yeah, you might be able, you might have, it's possible, right?
	You can find out if you get a hearing test, if you have an efficiency somewhere, and your brain might be producing it.
	And if you feed it with a sequence of sounds that's where your sound may be a bit spotty, it can diminish it.
	As far as I understand it, I have tried it once or twice, and it seems to help a bit some.
	Interesting.
	All right.
	Okay, well, thank you very, very much for the call.
	I'm not going to stretch this one out too much, although please call back in.
	I love the topic, Justin, so, you know, mull this over and come back.
	I love the abstract stuff.
	It's where my particular meat and drink happens to be laid out in my mind and heart.
	So please feel free to call back in, but as I said, I was up pretty late with the Nazi yelling in the room, so it's not tinnitus, it's German.
	And so...
	So thanks very much, everyone, for calling in.
	Always a great, great pleasure to have these conversations with Yowl.
	And please don't forget, follow me on Twitter, at Stefan Molyneux.
	Donate, donate, donate.
	Please, please, please.
	At freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	And use our affiliate link, fdrurail.com slash amazon, fdrpodcast.com, last but not least.
	And, you know, if you're on the video site, please, like, subscribe, and share.
	We are close.
	To 500,000 subscribers.
	And what that means to me is any video that gets less than 500,000 views, I'm going to find out where you live and ask why you didn't watch it, just so you know, in case you get that 3 a.m.
	knock.
	It probably will be gravel on the window, followed by a kind of Middle Eastern keening.
	Anyway, I'm still working on how best to introduce myself to listeners on a personal basis, but thanks everyone so much.
	Have a wonderful, wonderful week.

▲